I am a longtime brand guy - mostly from the client side. I write mostly about smart or foolish things that brands do. I teach branding and social media at NYU and for ThirdWay Brand Trainers. Worked in marketing for Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, DoubleClick and others ...

The Trouble With Finding Books Online - And A Few Solutions

This data is harder to interpret because the volume of books sold by bestselling authors with strong name recognition is so high. So consumers looking for the newest John Grisham, James Patterson or E.L. James novel may account for a good deal of the planned search. Less-recognized authors cannot impute that appearing on top-rated lists or in the “readers who bought x also bought y” feature is insignificant to their personal book sales.

Age and Genre Matter

Hildick-Smith observes:

You can’t generalize and say ‘books are books’ because the book market is made up of hundreds of unique, unrelated consumer niches – someone interested in a book on auto mechanics may be a completely different kind of buyer than someone interested in a book on romantic suspense.

Indeed, there is a significant variation by both age and genre in discovery behavior. Whereas 23% of mystery and thriller readers aged 55-64 discovered their last thriller in bookstores, only 1% did so online. On the other hand, only 16% of Young Adult and Fantasy readers discovered their last title in a bookstore while 9% did so online. Normalized for age, genre is still significant, but plays less of a role, as store discovery ranged from 17% to 25% in December 2012 while Internet bookseller discovery only varied between 5% and 9%.

And The Problem With Online Discovery Is …

The most striking statistic from the data is the failure of online retailers to benefit directly from the decline of physical booksellers as the hub for recommendations. The data doesn’t show the cause – only the effect. But the community of writers and readers at large recognize this gap, and some sites that seek to fill this void have prospered of late just as new entries begin to launch.

As I have written previously, public libraries can be an important part of the answer. In the private sector, however, two existing solutions to the problem of online discovery are gaining momentum and two new solutions offer promise:

Publishers have given away early copies of upcoming books to reviewers for years. Until recently, this was nearly impossible to do for eBooks while retaining digital security. But last fall, three-year-old NetGalley, a website owned by Firebrand Technologies, went through a makeover and it became significantly easier to read digital galleys on Kindle and tablet devices.

As a result, NetGalley’s member base has soared to over 100,000, putting it at a scale to influence the success of a book’s launch. The size and breadth of this community – which will continue to grow – affords even smaller publishers the ability to reach a critical mass of influencers at a reasonable cost.

Peer recommendation has a significant advantage over consumer reviews: peer reviews are not anonymous. They are tied to a social profile that is visible to all members. This means that fictitious reviewers – “sock puppets” – are somewhat easier to spot.

Founded six years ago as a social cataloging site by Otis and Elizabeth Chandler, Goodreads has become the most important book networking site on the Internet and the only independent book site (Amazon has an offering called Shelfari) to be called out separately in Codex’s reports. In December of 2012, 5% of frequent book purchasers reported having visited Goodreads in the previous week and yet Goodreads and comparable book-related websites like Shelfari overall accounted for as much past month book discovery as search engines, online video and social sharing sites like Pinterest combined.

Goodreads is also a tool that authors and publishers use to engage readers for contests and giveaways. Jynne Martin, a publicity director at Penguin told me,

We’ve offered several round of galley giveaways to help introduce [readers] to new debut authors such as Tanis Rideout (Above All Things) and Amy Brill’s The Movement of Stars.

Bookish is co-owned by three publishing giants: Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Hachette. The site launched just three weeks ago after over eighteen months of development. It’s intended to be a hybrid between a social site and a recommendation engine with plenty of original content sprinkled in to give readers reasons to return frequently.

Ardy Khazaei, the CEO of Bookish told me that:

Most online recommendation engines use collaborative filtering based on purchase or social networks. Instead we wanted to emulate how people recommend books. A person will recommend a book based on knowledge and understanding of the book. Our patent-pending technology searches through hundreds of thousands of reviews, ratings, etc to derive the “fingerprint” of that book. It is a massive, big data project.

As with all children of warring parents, Bookish must find neutrality to survive. Currently, the site largely features authors and books published by the owners. I spoke to Ellie Hirschhorn, the Chief Digital Officer for Simon & Schuster, who assured me that Bookish is currently a beta site and that the content will expand dramatically. She pointed specifically to Hulu as a model for Bookish.

Hulu is an online streaming video company founded in 2007 and co-owned by NBCUniversal, Fox & Disney-ABC. From the outset, Hulu’s founding CEO Jason Kilar (who left the company in January) elected to give outside content equal footing, going so far as to link to programs on competing sites if Hulu did not carry them. It was a brave choice and one that paid off, making Hulu the most popular place to stream television online.

When I asked Hirschorn about self-published books, she was unambiguous:

In our product roadmap, in our future plans we would like to deal with self-published works. There is a need for that. That’s something that the site can do that isn’t really being done out there. We could act as an American Idol for talent that is bubbling up there.

One hopeful sign for Bookish is that the editorial team – currently comprising seven editors – is completely independent from corporate management. It is too early to say whether Bookish will evolve into a neutral promoter of writing talent or will just be a glossy online magazine for big publishers. But the promise is there.

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Wow, GREAT article, David. You really covered everything I’ve been wondering about. Rabble sounds interesting with some reservations: the cost of buying feeds from NYT, WSJ, etc could be tough and their reviews lean toward the minuscule literary market. I’d think an aggregation of genre-specific enthusiasts (like my thriller reviews) would be the eventual winner for economic reasons as well as relevancy in the market.

I don’t see the comparison between Bookish and Hulu. The latter was a necessary-for-survival beach head established for the inevitable day when broadcast TV is no longer relevant. It actually delivers content. Bookish is a cynical attempt to emulate MTV: content as the advertisement, but even here Bookish is not offering free product. And if the editors are independent, why have they not branched out beyond their benefactors?

Thanks so much! My point about Bookish is that they have the opportunity to be a more broad-based discovery tool if they seize it. Although their early content reflects their owners, it’s also what they have the easiest access to. I’m willing to give them more than three weeks to show that they can represent the broader industry, including the best self-published authors.

Actually there will be NO cost for buying feeds from NYT, WSJ, etc, as Rabble will only be using one or two sentences from their reviews and then linking back to their sites for the rest (like Rotten Tomatoes does). Also, we will begin aggregating reviews of bestsellers–many of them genre-specific–and move on from there.

Love this article. This is indeed a huge problem. We have been concerning ourselves with the discoverability of indie literary fiction. It’s a category that has gone entirely underserved, but there should be no reason why literary books can’t thrive as well as genre books. They will have to eventually.

There is a difference in the way that genre and literary readers find and buy books; we have suggested to Amazon that they try expert curation as a model, similar to Bookish, with “house” editors of various sorts to cover everything from the experimental writers in the Vollmann and Pynchon school to the Harpers style of an Alice Munro. That would be one way to improve the findability of these titles. One problem as we see it is that the establishment “literary” press is tied in very closely with publishing houses, so as a rule they will not promote indie authors in any way. Current indie sites are geared toward genre readers and even with the little token literary coverage a few do, it simply isn’t enough; and these are completely different readerships anyway.

This has been a most interesting article as I have self-published my non-fiction book on Pearls called “Pearls of Creation A-Z of Pearls”, I am now the Marketing Manager of Pearls of Creation LLC. As I have chosen to ‘POD’ (Print on Demand) with ‘No Returns’ it is most difficult to introduce it to the most important part of my market, all Libraries, World Books, Major Retailers of books, etc. who choose to only buy from specific Agents or Suppliers. Fortunately I enjoy direct marketing it myself and am quite at ease and successful doing talks to any groups or clubs interested in learning more about pearls. I am convinced that there is a wider market out there for my book and I am now reaching out for help in that connection, please. My next decision is whether to introduce it in ‘e-book’ format, all help welcomed, thanks. Please look at my www.pearls ofcreation.com Marge Dawson.

I totally applaud this effort but readers are not the ones who have the problems finding books. My marketing company did a huge study with over 150,000 readers and over 90% said they have no problems finding books – their issue is finding enough time to read them and enough money to pay for them. The “discoverability issue” is a problem for publishers and writers who can’t get all the books they want to be discovered. Until someone identifies what the readers problems are none of these “solutions” will resonate.

Thanks so much for your comment. I would be very interested to see your data. The data I have seen does indeed suggest that readers – and not just publishers – have a discovery issue. The unreliability of online reviews has also been well-documented. With carefully crafted marketing campaigns infiltrating Facebook recommendations, twitter and even person to person (see Dunhumby’s bzzagent, for example), the quality of recommendations is highly suspect as well. It is very hard for me to imagine that with hundreds of thousands more books (most self-published) than were available just three years ago – and many of these book indexing on Amazon – that discovery, quality discovery, won’t continue to be a huge issue for some time to come.

MJ, I see “time to read them” and “money to buy them” pointing to the need for a reliable review site. Readers want to spend their time & money wisely, RABBLE will help them. (I have no affiliation with the Kickstarter project other than being a backer.)

Book discovery for readers would be so much easier if R.R. Bowker allowed the public to search their database of upcoming releases.

I know I can go to a library and access the database (if the library pays for access — my public library no longer does), but it would be much more customer-friendly if I could do so from home. If publishers were serious about making it easier for readers to find new books, they would force Bowker to open this resource to the public. And Bowker should restore the search agent email function they used to have but no longer do.

The same goes for Amazon — at one time many years ago, Amazon allowed readers to save their search criteria, and when a new title was listed that matched the reader’s criteria, Amazon would dispatch an email to the reader. They no longer offer that service and for the life of me, I cannot understand why. I mean, aren’t they in the business of selling books?

Why make it harder for readers to find the books they want to buy and read?